Yikes, crockoduck! Long ago, and far away, I had a pet duck whose favorite thing in the world was to play tag with me. I swear on Penn Jillette’s life this is true. He would chase me around our yard and bite at my ankles. Then, I would spin about and chase him for a bit. It was good times. If he was one of those invisible crockoducks, hoverFrog, then I wouldn’t have my lovely feet.

“I would rather believe in fairy tales than in such wild speculation.” —Ernst Chain, Nobel Prize winner

Sorta says it all. Of course, there’s no mention of what that quote was aimed at originally, because the same could be said for any religion.

I had a crocoduck when I was younger, but mom said it left me to be with Jesus.

Zack

How long is this book? I am continually amazed at the sheer size of the bullshit books. Like a book on biblical evidence that is 600+ pages long? You know what it contains? Lots and lots of block quotations.

Question #101: Some biologists talk about this cool new thing called DNA. It might appear that genetic analysis is the most powerful tool modern biologists have to explore evolution. But did you know that one of the co-discoverers of DNA once said something racist? Why are evolutionists always racist?

“On a serious note I’d like Ray Comfort to tell us the difference between his crockoduck and archaeopteryx.”

Ah, but Creationists say that Archaeoptryx was a hoax, don’tcherknow… along with many common ancestor primate fossils. They don’t even try to debate against fossils anymore, they just claim that the fossils are fake.

To make a kind of memetic note here, which I’ve made before… Look at what words Ray chooses to belittle evolution proponents. “Believer” and “faith”. That’s pretty telling. Those are the words that mean so little to Comfort that he uses them as a dig.

That says something interesting about his psychology, I think. I think he’s so fully convinced himself that “facts and evidence” are indeed the way to judge an issue, he’s just completely deficient in applying that without bias or prejudice to his own Creationist fairy-tale.

But as a memetic attack on religion, atheists couldn’t hope to craft a better title for his book than this one! With every copy of this book he publishes, he chips away at the “faith is a virtue” and “belief is good” concepts.

Siamang

And DUDE, if I see that in the bargain bin of Wal-Mart, I’m SO buying it. It’ll fit nicely on my hugely overcrowded bookshelf of books that contain tons and tons of evidence for evolution.

BTW look how THIN that fucker is! Oh, yeah, he disproved 200 years of science with a pamphlet! That’s how red-fucking-hot Comfort’s brain-matter is!

OOOOOHHHH, I want a copy so much… I wonder if the local Jesus store has it yet.

Viggo the Carpathian

I will be the first to admit that there are problems with evolution as a complete explanation of human evolution, particularly as Comfort points out with fossil continuity, but it is the most logical deduction currently available. New evidence may appear tomorrow that life on earth came from another planet or from an alien lab, but barring such revelation only evolution gives us an honest assessment. I do not like the unfounded extrapolation that sometimes comes from scientists who should know better but Comfort takes the presence of unfounded extrapolation and the dissent of one or two people as proof of the opposite. Even if evolution falls completely apart under the weight of evidence, this says nothing at all about the validity of creationism.

“I would rather believe in fairy tales than in such wild speculation.” —Ernst Chain, Nobel Prize winner

Chad said:

Sorta says it all. Of course, there’s no mention of what that quote was aimed at originally, because the same could be said for any religion.

Googling Chain, the quote seems to be fairly accurate. The man was a believer in (at least) theistic evolution, possibly some kind of vital force in that he seemed to object to the idea that the question of life could boil down, in the end to mere chemical reactions.

He was a Nobel Laureate in 1945 for his work on penicillin.

Creationists are very good at quoting evolution-doubting distinguished scientists from 30, 40, 50 or more years ago.

They ignore the overwhelming flood of growth of scientific knowledge in the past ten years. We’re talking computer models, the entire science of genomics… we decoded the human genome for crying out loud. Our knowledge in some fields of biology nearly doubles each year. Think about that, and then think about how relevant the opinions are of a scientist who died in the 1970’s, long before the Genomics Revolution.

Jason

Since I’m not at my home PC, I don’t have access to any elaborate imagine manipulation software, but I think I could find a picture of a crocodile, put bull horns on it, and put it on Ray Comfort’s body, to make the ever-stubborn “Crockabull”

Karen

Crocoduck vs. Jackalope

Hee, hee. We used to take long car trips around the West when I was a kid. Well do I remember the Jackalope postcards I used to collect from all the little turquoise gift shops and tourist traps where we’d stop. 😉

Jason

Missed my edit window:
Siamang said,

Crocoduck vs. Jackalope

Who wins?

Whoever wins, we lose.

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahaha!

cautious

1) Um, as a jackalope fan, jackalopes will always win.

2) Thank you Hemant for using the link to the excerpt.

3) The excerpt of Ray’s book is great because there, in the first paragraph, you already have lying. To say that Darwin formed the theory of evolution after he became disillusioned with God is playing fast and loose with Chuck’s life story. Chuck never, ever deemed himself an atheist, as much as we might want him to be on Team A. As a guy spamming his children’s book on this website a few days ago mentioned, the last paragraph of OOS mentions how Darwin believed that life had been “originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one”.

He was on the Beagle basically right after going to seminary, and had done quite a good deal of organizing the ideas behind natural selection before the death of his daughter Annie caused him to take his biggest steps away from Christianity.

Anyway, I’ll shut up here and let Chuck have the last word on Ray Comfort:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Darryl

Mr. Comfort strikes me as one of those guys that, were he smart enough to realize his error at some future time, he would not admit it and go on living off of the fairy tale he’s dedicated himself to. Why? Sheer embarrassment. A professor of theology once told me “never put anything in print until you’re 40.” The principle is really this: don’t ever commit yourself to a position before you’ve lived a while and learned a few things. Of course this presupposes that you’re continually looking for more facts and wider knowledge.

sabrina

I read the first page, and I think this book will only be hated by the fellows in the intelligent design camp. If I didn’t know that Ray Comfort actually wrote it, I would have thought it was a parody of what creationists think. He has, all by himself, demolished the last, lingering vestiges of intellectualism the intelligent design camp actually had left. As an evolutionist, I love your book Ray. Once it hits the bargain bin, I am so buying it:)

sasha

this book is soooo sad =/ the saddest thing is that people will actually buy it and believe it. i read the excerpt posted, and its such quote-mining nonsense that it makes you want to kill yourself. ray even mentions quote-mining in the intro, LOL – and as if quotes ever compare to the evidence

who’s up for making a rebuttal book? “Answers to the 101 Questions” or something? here’s what i have so far:

I like how he complains both that evolution is a faith and that evolutionists use non-definite language…
Nothing in science is completely certain, and that’s how it should be.
eg Turning on the LHC might destroy the world…
but then again, so might the act of shaving:

Viggo the Carpathian said,
…Even if evolution falls completely apart under the weight of evidence, this says nothing at all about the validity of creationism.

This is the main point. If evolution theory is lacking, then we need a better theory (or version of the theory) that better supports the evidence. We don’t need to adopt a theology based only on faith that ignores evidence by definition. If neo-Darwinism is over-turned, it won’t be by using the arguments that Ray uses, it will be by the careful crafting of a better theory (probably by an atheist).

Jason

It won’t be a creationist that shatters evolution. That’s for damn sure.

Aquaria

Mr. Comfort strikes me as one of those guys that, were he smart enough to realize his error at some future time, he would not admit it and go on living off of the fairy tale heÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s dedicated himself to. Why? Sheer embarrassment.

You’re nicer than I am. I doubt he believes jackshit about the things he’s saying, but he knows there’s $$$ in saying it. The people who lead the deluded are rarely anything like them.

I knew Garner Ted Armstrong, the evangelist. How? I met him in a bar. He made very definite overtures to myself and a friend with me to come home with him for a threesome. Of course, GTA had been known for his troubles with sexual “impropriety” for nearly a decade by then.

But do you think he preached hanging out in bars and picking up barely-legal women in his spiels on TV? Of course not! Do you think getting caught hitting on coeds or being accused of sexual assault (among other things) got the fundie delusionals to cease following him the first time he got in trouble over it (mid 70s)? Or even the second (1997)? Of course not! The idiots were there for the taking, and the man I knew was far too smart not to know that.

Some of these evolution-bashers may be perfectly sincere in their creationsim…but one rule in life usually holds true: Follow the money. When you’ve made people believe in an imaginary sky friend, the pickings are ever so easy. If you could make them believe that, you can make them believe anything, like how the world’s going to end if God doesn’t get $100,000 by next Friday. Or that the atheists are going to make you mate with monkeys if you don’t buy the book that will stop their evil science saying you are a monkey.

And it always works. Why is anyone ever surprised that it does?

Mriana

Late as usual here lately. Cockfort ceases to amaze me in what he will say and write. Who’s going to listen to him, much less believe him, except anti-intellectual Evangelical Fundies and the Religious Reich? I can’t even imagine that an intellectual would read it.

I like tea

I will be the first to admit that there are problems with evolution as a complete explanation of human evolution, particularly as Comfort points out with fossil continuity

Comfort’s claims about fossil continuity are all bunk. Despite his claims, we do have transitional fossils, and there’s really no stretch of fossil records that has scientists scratching their heads in bewilderment, even if there are still pieces missing.

Question #37: If evolution is so true, then how come we haven’t evolved noses that shoot out ice cream?

WTF??? Are you sure that any moment now this guy is not going to admit he is really an atheist and his whole scheme has been a parody all along? Or is he REALLY that stupid?

Aquaria

Question #37: If evolution is so true, then how come we haven’t evolved noses that shoot out ice cream?

Sheesh. Now we know his real problem: If he’d gone to real school, not Fairy Tale Elementary, he’d know that kids can shoot all kinds of things out their noses. Or maybe nobody wanted to sit next to that loser in the cafeteria.